


Weakness

by odoridango



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, F/M, Patronus, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 09:34:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3763156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren asks Annie to teach him how to cast a Patronus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weakness

**Author's Note:**

> THE HOGWARTS AU NOBODY ASKED FOR complete with contrary sorting. When I started Annie's section the lyrics of Raise It Up from Florence+the Machine started to run through my head a little bit. Bad extended metaphors ahoy. 
> 
> As far as my writing usually goes, this one ran out of steam toward the end and was much longer than I thought, so it might be a bit abrupt.

“Teach me to cast a Patronus,” he’d said, loud and clear in the library where any fellow passing Slytherin could hear, and it had surprised her, not because he asked, but because he had asked _her._

Being study partners and Herbology labmates with Armin gave Annie an acute awareness of Eren and the chaos he seemed to bring with him. He was arguably the most infamous of the Slytherins even after two years, flitting between the Hufflepuff and Gryffindor tables during mealtimes to say hello to Armin and Mikasa, punching a fifth-year prefect in the face in the second week of his first year for calling him a Mudblood, and his continued, casual defiance of everything the Slytherin House ever seemed to stand for. His Housemates, she had heard, had wanted to re-Sort him, but the Headmaster had put his foot down because there was no precedent, and even Eren wasn’t special enough to be the first student to earn that treatment.

She didn’t think she was all that different herself. An odd choice for a Hufflepuff, she’d heard her yearmates say, but she didn’t mind them because her loyalty was not theirs and she didn’t care for them or their opinions. But quietly, she listened, in the corridors, the common room, near the kitchens, the classrooms. She watched wand movements in class, the posture and lean of bodies, read tone and intention into people’s voices. There was a lot of information to be gained from the things people unwittingly gave away, and watching carefully, she absorbed all of it.

He said hello, goodbye, when he came to bother Armin out of the library. His strident voice carried easily over crowds and corridors, and despite his hair-trigger temper and impulsivity, he was not unintelligent, quick to start lively conversation and dispense with his viewpoints. He had many thoughts, many ambitions, and crouched over his parchment in the Great Hall with Armin and Mikasa at his side, he sometimes seemed to regard Hogwarts and the magic world with a combination of wonder and malaise.

She’d felt some kind of kinship with him then. There were times when she remembered how her father used to delight her as a child simply by shooting sparks from the tip of his wand, how he used to entice her with all the contents and creations of his cauldrons, but she also remembered how the same magic made him miserable, cursing his left leg to a limp, and left him bound to the pure-blood lineage of his ancestors.

“You’re the black sheep, you know,” Reiner said, and for a second cousin he wouldn’t be so bad if he weren’t so blind, so willing to pull wool over his eyes for his own convenience. Bertholdt, his fast companion who was another distant cousin of both of theirs, simply looked at her with unease, and she spurned his beady, nervous gaze, his pinched, silent mouth.

“I know,” she’d said in return, and thought that for all that fallen nobility, all that false concern, the family was fool to believe that they would be grateful. Sometimes she wondered why her father did not simply cut ties, leave; for all that she knew he was not ashamed of her mother or the elopement, nor did he ever neglect her.

“We’re family,” he said, but if they were family they shouldn’t have cared who he married.

“We’re better for it,” he said, and went back to drilling her on blocking curses, flinging unexpected hexes when she wasn’t looking, training her to be constantly aware, training her to be cynical and merciless.

So she’d looked at Eren and said, “Alright,” ready for something honest, something new.

Eren was as normal as one could get, but some of his spellwork was incredibly powerful, though his control was still shoddy. Among the repertoire of spells Annie’s father had drilled into her with sheer, numbing practice was the Patronus, primarily for emergency situations and faster communication—there was no perch for an owl at home, and sometimes her father’s black bear would curl around her, however briefly, before it dissipated. Third years like them couldn’t dream of casting Patronuses, a fifth-year spell, except that they did and they could.

Sometimes, at night, she would sneak out onto the Quidditch field and release her own Patronus, watch the sleek ripple of the lioness’ muscles as it bounded freely through the air, swift and powerful, weaving around the posts to return to her side and nuzzle up to her hand. She was her Patronus and her Patronus was her, her lion-heart, and watching her lioness pace underneath the moonlight calmed her in a way she couldn’t explain. It wasn’t like she couldn’t just walk in the Quidditch pitch herself.

It was on one of these outings that Eren had found her.

“That’s amazing,” he had exclaimed, eyes bright, smile wide. He was so enthusiastic and unbridled in his delight, and she’d been taken aback by his genuine interest and curiosity. Under his arm, warm pie from the kitchen, and he’d shared some of it with her as they struck up halting, but comfortable conversation. Muggle father, magical mother, but his mother had passed from Muggle illness when he was young, and he was left surrounded by magical influences but no source of personal support and guidance, just the pained, confused, and aborted efforts of his father to help.

“But don’t you think magic is better?” she asked, watching him, tracing the marks of old anger that appeared on his face, the soft tug of a frown, the deep furrow of his brow. “It’s faster. It can do what no Muggle could ever even attempt, even for all their science.”

“You don’t even know what Muggles can do,” he replied. “ _Muggles_ can do things no magical person, magical creature could ever do. If magical people left their bubbles, they wouldn’t make it in the Muggle world. Sometimes…”

 _Sometimes I feel like I gave up on something great coming here_ , is what he meant to say, and she felt like she could understand that, listening to him talk about what his life at home was like, so different from Hogwarts, could understand that when she had thought the same thing once or twice, that it would be great to leave, to see how the other side lived. Magical people only made up so much of the population, and when it came down to it, they were the ones who were outnumbered.

“Why?” she asked him at the end of the first session. His first attempts were already producing translucent white-silver blobs that floated in the air like bubbles, popping and dissipating in mere seconds.

“We’re not connected to the Floo Network, and no way my dad would ever let me have an owl,” he said carefully, and that was that. Not like she believed him; Eren was a horrible liar when he didn’t have time to prepare himself.

What would his Patronus be like? Some kind of bird of prey, perhaps, since he was always so restless and bright-eyed, or something unexpected and spirited, like a wolverine or honey badger. Eren was both predictable and spontaneous and that made him difficult to understand sometimes, full of grays and halfways and ever evolving viewpoints. But that was what made him interesting, was what kept her watching day after day. At times it drove her to think about the question everyone seemed to have – why Slytherin? Ambition and drive, Eren had in spades, but cunning and diplomacy were superfluous to him. He was shrewd, but selective about who he decided to confide his observations to and when.

Why Hufflepuff? No real reason, she supposed, it was where the Sorting Hat had put her, so that was where she stayed. The same went for him. The decisions weren’t really theirs. She looked at her silver lion-heart and watched the way Eren looked at her—was that decision hers? Leonhardt, lion-heart, but she was just a small girl, the weakest girl, heart rabbiting away inside her chest, thump thump thump. Grass always looked greener on the other side.

“Think happier thoughts,” she told him when he ripped up the grass under his fingers, frustrated with his lack of progress. The cloudy silver was stable now, flowed easily, steadily from his wandtip, but it never took shape, formless.

“You think I’m not trying?!” he said, snappy in a way that he rarely was to her.

“I think you don’t want to try,” she replied, full of rigid steel. She felt indignant, like his refusal was tantamount to refusing her. She wanted to see. She wanted to see his heart too.

He looked at her with clenched fists and furious eyes, but whatever words he had on his tongue, he didn’t say, because she was right.

The full Patronus grew slowly, silver as all Patronuses were, with tufts of fur here and there. A skunk, she had thought at first, before one day, in a fit of pique and defiance, Eren managed to reveal a single feral eye. No woodland animal would have eyes like that, she knew, like knowing like. So Eren’s heart grew, started with eyes then teeth, before elongated maw drew back in a leering smile and the head and body came all at once, leaping, twisting, pouncing with powerful coils of muscle. She wanted to touch it, a silvery wolf born on the full moon, but she knew all she could feel was air. Eren’s wolf bounded across the grass, chasing and nudging at her lioness playfully and running a single circle around her before settling at Eren’s side.

Eren looked like he wanted to cry. “Hey,” he said, and the wolf closed its eyes and touched its nose to his hand. He seemed reluctant to watch it fade, but didn’t try to cast the spell again, instead opting to head back to the castle.

“I didn’t expect that,” he muttered, rubbing his arms in the early morning chill. “That memory—it was more quiet than happy.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, remembering the way the wolf had arched toward the moon on its first leap, a bright arc against the dark of the sky. “That’s something that belongs to you. So own it.” Perhaps he chose when his heart waxed and waned, and perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps it was always in eclipse, overlapping, obscuring. She had gotten see the birth of the wolf, saw it emerge for the first time, and she thought it suited him, a wild birth led by gaze and tooth, bright eyes and an active mouth. She recognized it, the hunger, the desire, led by a heart that craved wide open spaces, led by a heart that devoured and consumed without mercy and could leave people trembling in his wake.

She lied to him for the first time. It did matter, and it mattered a great deal. Because now she wanted to see more. She wanted to see where that hunger led, how desperate that desire could get. She wanted to see where he would run to, and how far he would go. Lion-heart she was, and she felt it rising, biding time for a weak moment to start the chase, to secure the stakes.

“Do you think it suits me?” he asked, contemplative, a little nervous.

“Did you think it didn’t?” she replied, and watched his eyes turn to her, turn heated with answering challenge. Decisions were meant to be owned and made. And this, whatever it was, was one they were making for themselves.


End file.
